Gotta Follow the Rules

I’m going to say something that is probably going to annoy a lot of fans of the film: 1984’s Gremlins is not a good movie. Now, don’t take that as me trying to be snobbish or shit on a beloved family classic. I recognize that many people enjoy this film, and I even find it to be a fun diversion, something that, as a kid, I used to watch every few months, especially during the holiday season. Gremlins is a charming film, a delightfully strange family-comedy-horror romp. But structurally, this is not a very good movie.

I’m sure we’ve all seen it, the tale of a young adult man, Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan), who gets a Christmas present from his father, Rand (Hoyt Axton), in the form of a cute little fuzzy pet. Except this pet isn’t a cat or a dog but a mogwai. This cute little creature, named Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel), is a sweet as can be fuzzums, but there are rules for the care and feeding of a mogwai that, despite his best intentions, Billy fails to follow. He gets the creature wet, causing it to painfully reproduce into multiple extra mogwai. And then feeds these creatures (accidentally) after midnight (all of them except Gizmo), and they suddenly mutate into green, scaly creatures.

These creatures, the titular gremlins, are chaotic evil little beasts, and as soon as they’re done mutating, their pseudopods hatching, they break free, wreaking havoc across the quiet little town of Kingston Falls. Much cartoonish, comedic violence ensues (with just a dark enough edge to eventually warrant the development of the PG-13 rating), and suddenly people are dropping left, right, and center in this formerly Rockwellian small town. It’s up to Billy and Gizmo to track down all the gremlins (of which there are many) and put an end to the whole bunch before they break free and terrorize the whole world.

The idea of Gremlins is simple, and it’s not the basics of it that I’m arguing for or against. As I said, I like this film for what it is, which is a silly little monster romp. On that level it works just fine. But when I go back and watch the film now, what strikes me more than anything is that there really isn’t any point to everything that happens. By that I mean that no one really learns any lessons, nothing really changes for any of the characters. Sure, a few people that were mean and nasty in the first act of the film die, but by and large all the characters we could consider protagonists are in about the same spot in their lives at the end of the film compared to where they were at the beginning of the film. The gremlins come in and cause carnage, but it doesn’t really seem to be towards any kind of end.

Take Billy. He’s a guy living at home with his parents, trying to get his dream of being a cartoonist off the ground. He spends his days at the local bank, getting abused by his boss, Gerald Hopkins (Judge Reinhold), and having to deal with a problem customer, Ruby Deagle (Polly Holliday), an angry neighbor that hates his dog. Where does he end up by the end of the film? A guy living at home with his parents, still dealing with a crappy boss at a dead end job (assuming he even still has that job), and the only thing that’s really changed is that Mrs. Deagle is dead, thanks to the gremlins (but that’s not something Billy was directly involved in). Nothing really changes for Billy because of the gremlins, he just keeps existing.

You can actually follow this path for every character in the film. Billy’s girlfriend, Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates, which, along with Reinhold, marks another actor from Fast Times at Ridgemont High also appearing in this film), is basically just there to fawn over Billy and recount an awful story about why she hates Christmas. Her life doesn’t substantially change because of the gremlins, she just goes back to hating the holiday afterwards. Billy’s dad, Rand, is a failed inventor who continues to be a failed inventor after the events of this film. Nothing changes for these characters at all.

Hell, the only person that learns anything is Billy’s crazy neighbor, Murray Futterman (Dick Miller), who starts the film as a former Korean War soldier with PTSD going on about the evils of Japanese technology and how “everything is infested with gremlins”. And then, when the little green monsters show up (and nearly kill him), at least he gets to feel justified about being a cranky old crackpot that thinks gremlins were in everything because, well, they were. Not a great lesson, but I suppose it’s something.

Could any of these characters have changed and grown because of the gremlins? Sure. Billy could have gotten a backbone and stood up to his boss after learning to fight the little green creatures. Pulling together and fighting as a family could have inspired Kate to love the holiday again. Rand could have come up with an invention that actually worked, helping to fight the gremlins and save the day for his family. These are all story threads that are brought up in the script by Chris Columbus that then never pay off in the actual film, but they could have.

The film, though, gets distracted once the monsters show up. It spends a lot of time setting up these characters and their motivations in the first act-plus of the film, and then drops all of it once it’s time to watch the gremlins and their carnage. And don’t get me wrong, the carnage is fantastic. There’s a delightfully loopy, Looney Tunes-kstyle energy to their chaos and carnage. Director Joe Dante had a blast in the last act playing with these creatures and making a live-action cartoon, there is no doubt. But the film itself loses sight of the characters once the monsters show up, and it devolves into a basic (kid-friendly) horror film from that point forward.

Does that matter? Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. As just a basic, shallow, surface level creature feature, Gremlins does work. It’s got scares, it’s got laughs, and it has a whole lot of fantastic, practical creature effects. It wins on the front of just being a chaotic good time where you don’t really need to think. Plus, with its backdrop of Christmas tinged throughout, it makes for fun counter-programming against all the standard holiday films you’ve probably seen a hundred times before. Certainly in a choice between Gremlins and A Christmas Story I’m taking Gremlins every time (and not just because I loathe A Christmas Story with the fiery passion of a thousand suns).

But when it comes to substance, to actual development or good storytelling, Gremlins falls pretty flat. I like the characters in the film, I like the setup, and I think the overall vibes are great. I just wish that the whole build up and monster invasion actually led to something. Billy and his family do gather together for Christmas at the end, but they were going to do that anyway. Nothing is learned and no one evolves. Aside from a few cranky people dying (and they were old so they were probably going to die soon anyway) nothing of value was gained or lost. If the gremlins hadn’t shown up and caused their mess, we’d likely still be in the exact spot we reach by the time the movie ends. When your main creatures can be removed from the film and it doesn’t change the general trajectory for the lives of the characters involved, then something has gone very wrong with the story.

Gremlins is simple and enjoyable for what it is. It’s a fun little romp, a shaggy little story that gets by on creature effects and vibes. If that’s all you need then, absolutely, throw it on for this holiday. The reason I stopped watching it every year, though, was because I realized it’s a fairly shallow story that doesn’t really offer that much when it comes to characters or depth. I need just a little more, a touch of forward progression, some reason to care about what I’m watching, when I get into a film. Gremlins, for all it’s charm, is missing that and that’s what holds it back from being a truly great film in my book.